France and “la guerre de quatorze”: Never-forgotten names

Forged by war

MARNE, Somme, Verdun. The river plains of northern and eastern France are etched into the historiography of the first world war, just as the scars of battle—the remnants of trenches, the hundreds of military cemeteries—mark the French landscape. France was the main theatre of battle on the western front. It lost 1.4m soldiers, more than any other Western allied power. For France, the narrative of the war is not so much that of wasted lives and tragic loss as national heroism and glorious victory: the last time the country was unambiguously united on the right side of history.Much recent French academic work is a response to a school of thinking that emerged in the 1990s, which held that France nurtured a patriotic “culture of war”, which ensured a collective acceptance of conflict despite the horror, and sustained it through the notion of shared sacrifice and national unity.Historians today focus on the micro-detail: the lives and interaction in the trenches of the poilus (soldiers) and their officers. Nicolas Mariot’s “...



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